thisbigcity.net. May, 2014. Brazil’s burgeoning middle class have an important place in the country’s slums. This finding is part of a survey released by the newly created Instituto Data Favela which established that, in 2013, 65% of the country’s slum-dwellers belonged to the middle class. In 2003, this proportion was 33%.

Celso Athayde, creator of youth group Central Única de Favelas (CUFA) and Instituto Data Favela, explains that the National Department of Strategic Affairs considers a family to be middle class, or ‘class C’ when their monthly income is in the range of R$1,064 to R$4,591 (US$480 to $2,060). “But we are not only interested in the middle class,” he argues, “We want to benefit all community residents through sustainable and comprehensive development, achieved through economic avenues.”

Somewhat inevitably, this research also showed that the lower classes have decreased in Brazil’s slums. Class D (where income is between R$768 and R$1,064 ) and class E (income less than R$768) fell from 65% in 2003 to 32% in 2013. Athayde believes this was achieved by an overall reduction in extreme poverty driven by the economic growth experienced across the country in recent years, which in turn has resulted in an increase of employment and entrepreneurship among the population.

Vision Statement
The Wilson Center seeks to be the leading institution for in-depth research and dialogue to inform actionable ideas on global issues.

Mission Statement
The Wilson Center, chartered by Congress as the official memorial to President Woodrow Wilson, is the nation’s key non-partisan policy forum for tackling global issues through independent research and open dialogue to inform actionable ideas for Congress, the Administration and the broader policy community.

Brain Pickings is the brain child of Maria Popova, an interestingness hunter-gatherer and curious mind at large, who has also written for Wired UK, The New York Times, Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab, and The Atlantic, among others, and is an MIT Futures of Entertainment Fellow.

Brain Pickings is a human-powered discovery engine for interestingness, a subjective lens on what matters in the world and why, bringing you things you didn’t know you were interested in — until you are. Founded in 2006 as a weekly email that went out to seven friends and eventually brought online, the site was included in the Library of Congress permanent web archive in 2012. Here’s a little bit about my 7 most important learnings from the journey so far.

Most of all, Brain Pickings is a record of my own becoming as a person — intellectually, creatively, spiritually — and an inquiry into that grand question of how to live, of what it means to lead a good life.

Triumph of the City: how our greatest invention makes us richer, smarter, greener, healthier and happier
Speaker: Professor Edward Glaeser
Chair: Professor Henry Overman
This event was recorded on 14 March 2011 in Sheikh Zayed Theatre, New Academic Building

Building and maintaining cities is difficult and density has costs, but in this presentation Professor Edward Glaeser will argue that these costs are worth bearing, because whether in London’s ornate arcades or Rio’s fractious favelas, whether in the high rises of Hong Kong or the dusty workplaces of Dharavi, our culture, our prosperity, and our freedom are all ultimately gifts of people living, working, and thinking together — the ultimate triumph of the city.

As we all go busily about our daily lives, only very rarely do most of us consciously think about or visualize the flows, networks, uses and implications of energy underpinning our very existence and the functioning of the cities in which most of us live and work. This backgrounding or taken-for-grantedness is reflected in the urban studies literature where a sustained focus on energy has been, with a few notable exceptions, conspicuous by its near absence.

A recent Special Issue of Urban Studies on ‘Urban energy transitions: places, processes and politics of socio-technical change’ contributes to thinking through the complex, diverse, always emerging and situated relations between energy and cities at a time when these are (re)appearing on political and policy agendas for a host of reasons. Security of energy resources and supply lines, climate change, affordability and accessibility, and governance and management of utilities are some of the ‘big’ stakes and issues through which energy systems are being rethought and reconfigured across North and South, implicitly or explicitly in relation to built environments and urban lives and lifestyles. But, in contrast to much of the normative policy agenda, taken as a whole, the Special Issue does not reduce the urban to a specific location, context, administrative level or actor, and nor does it view the urban as a readily available instrument or tool through which transitions of energy systems (on ‘other’ scales) can be easily deployed. Instead, we study an urban which is a constitutive and inseparable component (or set of intersecting components) of very diverse processes and practices of energy transition across North and South. By reflecting on the urban materialities, imaginaries, controversies and politics through which energy systems do and can change, and thus on what is, but also what might be, a specifically urban socio-technical transition, from Cape Town to London and Amman to Freiburg, we open up theory and practice to actualities and possibilities of urban energy relations which are other than black-boxed, bounded, pre-set and confiscated by governmental actors or transnational utility companies.

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